THE CAMILLA STEN PAGE: THE LOST VILLAGE, a folk-horror Swedish thriller in translation & THE RESTING PLACE, atmospheric domestic thriller

THE LOST VILLAGE
CAMILLA STEN (tr. Alexandra Fleming)
Minotaur Books
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

The Publisher Says: The Blair Witch Project meets Midsommar in this brilliantly disturbing thriller from Camilla Sten, an electrifying new voice in suspense.

Documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the vanishing residents of the old mining town, dubbed “The Lost Village,” since she was a little girl. In 1959, her grandmother’s entire family disappeared in this mysterious tragedy, and ever since, the unanswered questions surrounding the only two people who were left—a woman stoned to death in the town center and an abandoned newborn—have plagued her. She’s gathered a small crew of friends in the remote village to make a film about what really happened.

But there will be no turning back.

Not long after they’ve set up camp, mysterious things begin to happen. Equipment is destroyed. People go missing. As doubt breeds fear and their very minds begin to crack, one thing becomes startlingly clear to Alice:

They are not alone.

They’re looking for the truth...
But what if it finds them first?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Sten is a Force. Her storytelling chops, in this her debut novel!, are truly impressive. Usually split timelines, here denoted by labeling chapters "Now" and "Then", give me pause. It so seldom adds impetus to the natural pace of the story. In Author Sten's case she overcame this. By itself that merits praise...but to use it, as here, in setting a perceptual "trap" for her readers, is extraordinarily tough to pull off.

The framing device that threatened, at first, to derail my enjoyment of the story was also the biggest surprise to me: A long stretch of "Now" spent reading letters discovered in the Lost Village. While that by itself isn't bad, so very often it is a deus ex machina and so feels like a cheat to me. I re-read parts of the section to see if I could find the seams but I couldn't...I kept running across images I lingered over (eg doubts creeping up on a character like "stinging little devils") and action I wanted to follow right now. That's good horror writing...good writing, period.

Much of the seemingly inevitable comparison-to-known-things marketing has borne down hard on Midsommar, a stunningly beautiful folk-horror film whose story is stretched to the point of snapping in order to make its beautiful scenes...seriously, go look at it, the stills should be sold as art!...work. Also harked back to is The Blair Witch Project, whose shakycam found-footage horror story was, to put it mildly, a farrago but whose fascinating editing (predictable and pedestrian aren't necessarily ineffective in horror storytelling) has deeply influenced the entire field of visual horror storytelling. This comparison is, to me, fair and reasonable; the Midsommar one is a stretch and honestly a disservice to the story here told.

This is folk horror as only a Swede setting her story in Sweden would, possibly could, produce. But it's much, much more unnerving to me, more frightening, than Midsommar because this story is about the intersection of mental illness and religious fanaticism that is its own form of mental illness...but grounded in a solid, meaningful, and thoughtful take-down of capitalism and patriarchy.

We perceive women suffering from mental illness with a sort of paradoxical double-sidedness; both victims and monsters, simultaneously infantilized and feared. A certain level of dysfunction is accepted—after all, women who are suffering mild depression and starving themselves aren’t going to leave their husbands or start revolutions, which is very practical indeed.
–and–
We view a depressed upper-class woman from a stable family background dealing with depression as “having the blues,” while the homeless woman on the street corner battling auditory hallucinations is a thing to be feared, a threatening monster. Not a person in need of help. Not someone with thoughts, dreams, fears, and needs of their own. Not a fully formed human being with agency and identity, suffering from an illness and doing their best to function as well as they can.

Author Sten is singin' my song; Translator Fleming is wrapping it in stylish English.

Several friends of mine who read and reviewed the book, all of them women, weren't impressed with the author's feminist take as presented, and to a woman they were dismissive of the "folk horror" trappings the US publisher wrapped around the story. In that latter I hesitantly join them, but as a man I felt the feminist, or more accurately anti-patriarchal, views the author quite clearly espouses by way of contrast to the "Then" action and more clearly espouses in the "Now" if via a dark means, rang me like a bell.

Permaybehaps I'm settling, in the sense that it might not be as clear to the women because it's not enough of a feminist standpoint. I can't say; I can say that, to me, this read bound together creepy, scary real-life threats and challenges with a social and political slant I am in sympathy with. You should give Author Camilla Sten a shot, see what you think.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE RESTING PLACE
CAMILLA STEN (tr. Alexandra Fleming)
Minotaur Books
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A spine-chilling, propulsive psychological suspense from international sensation Camilla Sten.

The medical term is prosopagnosia. The average person calls it face blindness—the inability to recognize a familiar person’s face, even the faces of those closest to you.

When Eleanor walked in on the scene of her capriciously cruel grandmother, Vivianne’s, murder, she came face to face with the killer—a maddening expression that means nothing to someone like her. With each passing day, her anxiety mounts. The dark feelings of having brushed by a killer, yet not know who could do this—or if they’d be back—overtakes both her dreams and her waking moments, thwarting her perception of reality.

Then a lawyer calls. Vivianne has left her a house—a looming estate tucked away in the Swedish woods. The place her grandfather died, suddenly. A place that has housed a dark past for over fifty years.

Eleanor. Her steadfast boyfriend, Sebastian. Her reckless aunt, Veronika. The lawyer. All will go to this house of secrets, looking for answers. But as they get closer to bringing the truth to light, they’ll wish they had never come to disturb what rests there.

A heart-thumping, relentless thriller that will shake you to your core, The Resting Place is an unforgettable novel of horror and suspense.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've known someone with prosopagnosia well, and for a lot longer than I have known the word or the condition existed. It's one of the reasons I was really eager to get this book's DRC and devour it. I was so happy to see this under-represented and misunderstood disability represented at all. I hoped, of course, to see it represented well.

It was. The condition of "face-blindness" was truly well established, in a complex and multivalent way; it was also chillingly effectively woven into a deeply unsettling, even unnerving, plot.

Prosopagnosia, face blindness. It means my brain doesn’t process human faces the same way others’ do. I can’t recognize faces, so have to memorize distinguishing features instead.

What happens, as you've seen in the book description, is a scene of brutal violence that simply can't be forgotten by anyone who's experienced anything remotely close to it. But, in Eleanor's case, it's a scene that lacks a very important resonance. She's seen a murder, and a murderer, and she can't forget it but can't process it, can't help assign guilt to the guilty because she is biomechanically incapable of the necessary function. And then what happens? She inherits the house her grandmother failed to tell her that she owned. Way to lard the stress into the liver of the story...another set of unknown people, faces ever unknown to her and markers to somehow fasten onto their identities.

From that point on, I was so very sold on this read. I could not WAIT to see how this awful psychological double bind would resolve.

The things I liked were, like the things I liked in The Lost Village, the ones that brought the character to life:

...it’s the body that panics first, the brain that follows. If I can just keep my breaths slow and force myself to relax then I can trick my mind into calm.
–and–
“Your fear is valid, but that doesn’t make it real. The fear may be true, but it doesn’t have to be your truth.”

They're present, they're satisfyingly numerous, but in the end the thing that will make or break the read is one's response to the ending. The entire book is a set-up to the set-piece in the last, say, thirtyish pages. It's a big ask from a sophmore novelist. I was rewarded by it because its resolution was so very timely and so personal to me. I can't say more because the Spoiler Stasi will descend on me with malice and fury. This post will clue you in to the direction we're heading if you care to be enlightened.

I thought the use of a big, old, dark manor house in the country was going to be a silly distraction, a gewgaw meant to distract me from something...it wasn't, and it was; the big winter storm, another gothic-storytelling staple, was similarly used. These weren't my favorite moments in the book. I will say they didn't "ruin" my experience of the story as can happen with such inessentials. The nature of the story is so basically well-crafted that Author Sten could've chosen any one of an array of settings and accomplished her task.

I confess that, as I read along and Eleanor kept doing her Eleanor thing, I was half-dreading the need to slap an "ableism" content warning on the review. I was so relieved that I did not feel Author Sten had crossed my own mental threshhold for use of a disability shading into the old, dark "crippled" territory I've still been hit with in the twenty-first century.

I'm going to leave the last words to Eleanor, via Author Sten. I think they say more about what I derived from this read than I can.

She says that wounds can leave scars on our souls just like on our bodies, and that we have to learn to live with them rather than try to rid ourselves of them completely.

RED RIGHT HAND, Lovecraftian urban-fantasy violence by one pissed-off woman & TRAMPLING IN THE LAND OF WOE, Alexander + Hephaestion in the Underworld

TRAMPLING IN THE LAND OF WOE
WILLIAM L.J. GALAINI (The Patron Saints of Hell #1)
Evolved Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle original, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: While the First World War rages on Earth's surface, Hephaestion discovers the ideal opportunity to rescue his general, king, and soulmate Alexander the Great from the lowest ring of Hell. The problem? No one’s ever dared such a feat before, and only a madman would try.

As Hephaestion descends into the pit of eternal torment, he discovers unlikely accomplices willing to assist his impossible plan…but complications and subterfuge leave Hephaestion and his allies scrambling for footholds in a world governed by demons, devils, and opportunists. Soon the fires of Hades are the least of his worries as he must outrun, outgun, and outmaneuver beasts and monsters hell-bent on his destruction.

With a cast of unexpected characters from civilizations long buried and historical figures you only thought you knew, Hephaestion must answer the true question of his quest: What does it mean to be known, to be remembered...and perhaps, to be human?

Loyalty, commitment, and love ignore the bounds of death and time in an adventure that explores culture, history, and obsession through the lens of a man who defies reason.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Spooktober starts with a crashing, steam-billowing bittersweet battle-heavy CRASH. Hell, where Alexander of Macedon, genocidal psychopathic horndog, has been spending his afterlife, is gonna have to give him up...Hephaestion, Alexander's earthly lover, best friend, confidant, and now rescuer, has had entirely enough of hanging around in Purgatory waiting for Alexander's sins to be expiated and for him to join up with the patient, still-loving man whose death precipitated Alexander's own.

But you, O Reader, already know...be careful what you wish for, lest the answer be "Yes."

Hephaestion's decision, now that the whole planet's gone mental and tossed itself a mechanized slaughter in the form of the Great War (as WWI was known then...really, it's obvious that our name for it is a retronym if one gives it even a minute's actual thought), is worthy of some demented I Love Lucy-in-Hell weirdness...dead bodies as disguises, inevitable exposure, meeting a new, improved Scooby-group. But it takes us quite a while to get to this point...we're in Hell, not Purgatory, but nowhere near finding Alexander.

The action is, while magisterially slow, quite well-thought-out, and Hephaestion's motives for his quest elicit a lot of push-back from many sources both helping and hindering him. (All the Jesuits in History ending up in Hell was one of my happiest reading-life moments. I love, love, love the little easter-egg moments Author Galaini chucks into this stew!) One character in particular, Yitz the Jew, was perilously close to a stereotype. I got the impression, fortunately, that the author was actually aiming for archetype and, being in Purgatory, then Hell, wasn't saying this is how Jews are but this is how Jews are seen as part of the horribleness of Hell.

The truly delightful conception of the Afterlife as a place where there are all periods of History and all levels of technology intermingling, to be like Doctor Who's episode where Winston Churchill is Caesar and Morris Minors fly through the air under giant balloons was designed: Wrongness, but playfully presented, is still wrongness and still evokes unease. As the struggle to reach his belovèd Alexander continues, Hephaestion remains obsessed with achieving his millennia-held goal of reuniting with him. All around him are people warning, hinting, offering other views. Blinders on, Hephaestion pursues his goal.

And achieves it.

This is not The Song of Achilles. There is no beautiful ending for anyone in Hell. And, as Hephaestion finally achieves his reunion, the full and terrible truth of the answer to a prayer being "Yes" is, at last, borne in upon him.

That is why I gave the story four stars in spite of its too-slow-for-me pace, in spite of its occasionally unpleasant characterizations, in spite of its flaws whatever they might be to you or me. The love one bears for the heart's own darling is not always the feeling the heart's own darling deserves.

A bitter dreg to drink. A truly powerfully importantly real, urgent Truth. Falling in love is not always, or even all that often, the happy end.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

RED RIGHT HAND
LEVI BLACK (Mythos War #1)
Tor Books
$21.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Charlie Tristan Moore isn’t a hero. She’s a survivor. Already wrestling with the demons of her past, she finds herself tested as never before when she arrives home one night to find herself under attack by three monstrous skinhounds straight out of a nightmare. Just as hope seems lost, she is saved by a sinister Man in Black, dressed in a long, dark coat that seems to possess a life of its own and wielding a black-bladed sword in his grisly red right hand.

But her rescue comes at a cost. The Man in Black, a diabolical Elder God, demands she become his Acolyte and embrace a dark magick she never knew she possessed. To ensure her obedience, he takes her friend and possible love, Daniel, in thrall as a hostage. Now she must join The Man in Black in his crusade to track down and destroy his fellow Elder Gods, supposedly to save humanity from being devoured for all eternity.

But is The Man in Black truly the lesser of two evils–or a menace far more treacherous than the eldritch horrors she’s battling in his name?
Red Right Hand is the first book in the fantastically creepy Mythos War series by Levi Black.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nyarlathotep! The Crawling Chaos!! I am so so sold on this read. People using ol' H.P.'s stuff in ways that'd probably make him scowl and whine? Bonus points! And Charlie Tristan Moore is someone who would make ol' H.P.'s hackles rise. A woman, a mutt, a person without a pedigree? *gasp* Bring it, say I, and fling it on his grave.

So in this trilogy-starting story, Charlie (our narrator) meets with some really scary, very weird...dog-things...inside her front door as she stumbles in drunk from a binge trying to drink a boy she liked off her mind. The action, in other words, is reported in first person and starts from the get-go, never slacks, and keeps getting higher and higher stakes riveted to it.

What works best about this is that Charlie (Charlotte, really) Tristan Moore's learning what the ruddy hell's going on at the same time we are. She's not narrating from either the Afterlife or a cozy chair in front of a fire, a brandy balloon a-swirl in her hands, relating her youthful wild adventures.

What slightly less impressed me was Charlie Tristan Moore's gradually revealed psych history...it was all a bit too pat, and too obviously engineered to make her the proper tool for Nyarlathotep. It led to the feeling that she was a created tool instead of what I understood her to be, a fortuitously shaped stick that Nyarlathotep found here in ordinary reality and co-opted for his use. If the former is the case, then what the heck would an entity that could exert its will so powerfully *need* with a hench-rat?

Well, no matter, what kept me happily reading was the pace of events once the Man in Black gets his hooks into her and sets her her tasks. I was in the mood for horror, it's Spooktober, we've got truly awful people trying to screw up reality even more than they've managed to do in the past six years...gimme the fake kind, with excitement but no danger, please. This first-of-three violent, gory supernatural-horror-defeating stories filled the bill admirably, used the Lovecraft Universe very creditably while still ringing changes on the themes so they didn't feel leaden and overburdened with MEANING. This is never easy. Author Levi did it well. I know I've slammed those dragon-tattoo books for their repugnant sexual violence against women before. It's not a subject I invite into my entertainment these days.

What made me respond differently to this story is that the violence of Charlie Tristan Moore's past is not presented pruriently, is not downplayed in its effects on her and her life as I felt was the case in those Swedish stories. As she puts herself into terrible situations to serve a man and his needs in this story, Charlie's furiously ragingly hating him, and expressly making herself remember why what happened to her is making Nyarlathotep's abuse of her worse.

It felt, then, for once like her pain was her enemy not her secret power.

And she still succeeds, she still lives, she still has Love to save. It worked for me. If Spooktober's going to mean something to you, try slotting this read into it.

KRAKEN CALLING, best be sure to pick up *now*

KRAKEN CALLING
ARIC McBAY
Seven Stories Press
$22.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping near future dystopic fantasy in the Octavia Butlerian vein of the Parable of the Sower novels.

Political activist and anarchist author Aric McBay (Full Spectrum Resistance) toggles between the years 2028 and 2051 to give us the experience, with breathtaking realism, of what might happen in the span of just one generation to a society that is already on the brink of collapse.

In 2028 environmental activists hesitate to take the fight to the extreme of violent revolution. Twenty years later, with the natural environment now seriously degraded, the revolution is brought to the activists, rather than the other way around, by an authoritarian government willing to resort to violence, willing to let the majority suffer from hunger and poverty, in order to control its citizens when the government can no longer provide them with a decent quality of life.

So it is the activists who must defend their communities, their neighbors, through a more humane and in some ways more conservative status quo of care and moderation.

And the outcome here is determined by the actions of those who resist more than it is by the actions of the nominally powerful.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Non-fiction writer (Peak Oil Survival, Deep Green Resistance) Aric McBay makes his points in fictional form. What he has done is not the usual thing for him, analyzing and contextualizing social and political trends for a left-leaning audience; this has always been his forte as a writer.

I think it still is. This novel makes a very trenchant attempt to put human skin on the bones of social movements for change, favoring equitable and reasonable restructuring of our self-evidently unsustainable lives.

“It’s always hard to tell, isn’t it? How the future could change from the smallest actions,“ Simón mused. “I believe we made things better. We bought time. Breathing room. We stopped one more. We didn’t improve things as dramatically as we hoped. But we made room for a hundred other movements to flower. Some of them failed, but some of them are amazing....”

“The tides always rise and fall for us,”Simón said. “That’s the nature of struggle. There is no guarantee, no permanent victory.”

“The work of the revolutionary is to plow the sea,” Addy quoted.”

It is indeed, Addy. It is indeed. To see your best efforts subsumed under the heaving mass of humanity in its indifference and fearful rejection of change. To know you're not ever going to prevail, no matter how many times you win. But to be sure you're harrowing the surfaces of the waters plowed and allowing things buried to come to the surface? It's a reward beyond price.

Dystopia, then, is inevitable? I don't think it is, though a lot depends on the individual's concept of "dystopia" and their tolerance for ambiguity. Most revolutionaries are absolutists, and should be kept far, far away from the levers of power. We're seeing that in the House of Representatives in the US during 2022. Revolution is hard, and requires people to be very, very hard...and these revolutionaries are obdurate, but brittle.

This means that, like Evelyn in our near-term future (2028), we need to be sure to combat that obduracy effectively. Or the 2051 sections of the story won't be a warning klaxon but a sad prediction.

HOME GROWN TALENT, second Creative Types series M/M rom-com

HOME GROWN TALENT
SALLY MALCOLM & JOANNA CHAMBERS (Creative Types #2)
Amazon Kindle (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 on Kindle, available now

Rating: 4 singed-by-profanity stars of five

The Publisher Says: Are you for real?

From the outside, it looks like model and influencer Mason Nash has it all—beauty, fame, and fortune. With his star rapidly rising, and a big contract up for grabs, Mason’s on the verge of hitting the big time.

When an opportunity arises to co-host a gardening slot on daytime TV with his ex’s brother, Owen Hunter, Mason is definitely on-board. And he intends to use every trick in the book to make the show a hit—including agreeing to his ruthless producer’s demand to fake a ‘will-they/won’t-they’ romance with his co-host…

Owen Hunter is a gardener with a huge heart and both feet planted firmly on the well-tilled ground. He’s proud of the life he’s built and has absolutely no desire to be on TV—yet somehow he finds himself agreeing to do the show.

It’s definitely not because he’s interested in Mason Nash. The guy might be beautiful—and yeah, his spoiled brat routine presses all Owen’s buttons in the bedroom—but Owen has no interest in a short-term fling with a fame-hungry model.

As the two men get closer, though, Owen starts to believe there’s more to Mason than his beautiful appearance and carefully-curated online persona—that beneath the glitz and glamour is a sweet, sensitive man longing to be loved.

A man Owen might be falling for. A man who might even feel the same.

But in a world of media spin and half-truths, Owen is dangerously out of his depth. And when a ridiculous scandal explodes online, with Owen at its heart, it starts to look as though everything he thought was real is built on lies—including his budding romance with Mason…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHERS. THANK YOU.

My Review: Remember the story of Lewis and Aaron, the grumpy/sunshine boss/PA delight set in the TV world? It lost enough points for its SIX w-bombs not to get to five stars despite my deep affection for its story line and its delightful silliness. All that was wrapping a quite serious love story between two sad, lonely men whose lives are dedicated to a world that uses them for what it can get.

The authors? Nice people, one supposes, but severely addicted to carpet w-bombing the reader. Six was bad. TWELVE IN THIS STORY. Twelve! Using any word not a conjunction, pronoun, proper name, or toponym (and that one's iffy) twelve times in one's story is simply too damned many.

Anyway. The story, as expected from these two mavens of the genre, was a cracker. Owen raised his teenaged brother after their mother's death; as a barely fledged kid himself he...did a great job. He worked. He protected. He never left his brother in the lurch as he got left. His brother's grouchy personality, built to withstand misery and grief, was just more than he could handle. I think it's the most touching story I've ever read, and Owen's power as a character largely began from that base. When we meet him in this story, he's along for the ride at an awards show for Lewis's hit TV show, Leeches. One of the participants' plus-ones is young Mason Nash...Lewis's ex, met at the beginning of episode one, a model/Instagram influencer. Owen judged him harshly while Lewis was dating him. Mason rather curled his lip at Owen, too.

So guess what happens!

It's a rom-com. You know what you're getting, you know when you're going to get it, and this being 2022 we know we're in for some sex. The sex scenes add to the relationship drama, and the last one in particular was deeply, deeply relatable to anyone who's ever had a long-term relationship. So used well, written well, satisfyingly up to snuff on the heat-level scale...nothing tepid about these guys!...and exactly the proper amount of smexytimes for the story. (It doesn't hurt that I identify with Owen, either.)

One of the surprises in the story was the deeply sympathetic portrayal of "an influencer" or massively online person as a regular guy trying to make a living in a very cut-throat industry...two, really, as he was modeling as well as Instagramming his life. Or lifestyle, I suppose...like all the surface-gloss purveyors of Fantasy, there's a lot of effort behind the Glamour. Then there's Owen, simple son of the soil that he is, who runs a gardening business that doesn't require him to tart anything up for the cameras and likes it that way. But...key realization...Owen is a caretaker, with all the control and trust issues that implies. So, funnily enough, is Mason (real name it's not, but you'll find that out for yourself). Different angles, same path, and Owen'd been on it longer so has much, much more invested in the identity without really taking in his façade's effects on others. Mason's simply never, as a twentysomething, thought much about anyone he wasn't responsible for.

What draws the men together is what ultimately causes the only serious explosion neither is equipped to handle: Working together on something neither has any control over. It was a shock to me that Owen said yes, but thinking about myownself in my thirties, well...yeah, I see it. Mason's early-onset adulthood led him to reflect, "Responsibility, once assumed, was almost impossible to put down." This being an eternal verity known to most all of us who've taken it up as Owen had to do, as Mason must do, left me nodding along. Not for the first, or last, time, either. The authors are quite able to repackage Received Wisdom as new knowledge to their characters. It's one of the things that makes me enjoy these stories of younger people more than many, if not most, others.

The unfairness of Mason's life, as it leaks little by little into Owen's awareness, makes their estrangement that much more painful for them both. It was, TBH, about as blatantly signaled as can be. For a wonder, that actually worked to heighten its effect because of a choice I imagine was organic to the process of writing a series with two authors: Dual narrators. It's surprising to me how well the technique, mated to this story line, caused me to flip the pages past faster and faster. Kudos! By the end of the story, each knows the other's burdens, and it truly works as relationship binder. And the happily-ever-after that is part and parcel of the genre's promises to its readers arrived in a welcome, more grounded way than I thought it would...if at the expense of feeling a wee bit rushed.

Rein in the w-bombing, please, and bring on #3 soon!

THE WOMAN IN THE LIBRARY, new direction for award-winning Aussie novelist

THE WOMAN IN THE LIBRARY
SULARI GENTILL
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Amazon link since their storefront is such a mess to use)
$26.99 hardcover, available today

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In every person's story, there is something to hide...

The ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is quiet, until the tranquility is shattered by a woman's terrified scream. Security guards take charge immediately, instructing everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified and contained. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers, who'd happened to sit at the same table, pass the time in conversation and friendships are struck. Each has his or her own reasons for being in the reading room that morning—it just happens that one is a murderer.

Award-winning author Sulari Gentill delivers a sharply thrilling read with The Woman in the Library, an unexpectedly twisty literary adventure that examines the complicated nature of friendship and shows us that words can be the most treacherous weapons of all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Hannah Tigone, successful Sydney author, is writing a new book. She's set it in Boston, Massachusetts, and that being an almost literal antipode to Sydney, she needs some help with the local color. Traveling there is out; this is the time of COVID. Google Street View is something you're not quite going to get the "feel" of a place from; the look, yes. Maybe if it were a refresher for a previously visited place...but no. Enter Leo Johnson, Boston-based novelist and strangely excited research/local-color assistant to Hannah. His take, which becomes an intake, on the story is a framing device for a strange (and not entirely successful) hybrid epistolary/story-within-story tale of murders, criminality, race, and reconciliation.

The manner of the story's introduction:

I am a bricklayer without drawings, laying words in sentences, sentences into paragraphs, allowing my walls to twist and turn on whim...no framework...just bricks interlocked...no idea what I'm building or if it will stand...no symmetry, no plan, just the chaotic unplotted bustle of human life.

It's all there from the get-go...the beautiful, elegant phrase-making, the sheer bravado of owning up to feeling confused and not being quite up to the task in hand...well! Okay, I know where my money's going on the craps table. We're heading for Misdirection City by way of The Long and Winding Road.

What follows is largely that, only it's split into segments by the nature of its authors-collaborating (increasingly Leo inserts his personal take on the story Hannah sends him, and he doesn't hold back from the get-go). My best example of this is very early in the book, when the dreaded "separated by a common language" issue rears its confusing head.

Australian/Commonwealth-usage note: The word "jumper" does not exist in the US. It appears to mean "sweater" or "sweatshirt" more often than not as used in this book. But believe your local-colorist...it is not extant in US contexts. At all. If you say it to a street-American they will stare at you...a few might ask, in mild bewilderment, if you mean "jumpsuit" which you most emphatically do not:

NOT a normal, unobtrusive street-wear item like a sweater or sweatshirt. Like our Hannah means it to be. It's at this point that I began to trust the framing device, about which review-readers have heard, to deliver on its often overlooked promise: Can authors working together be translated into a satisfying reading experience?

It can. It does. It's going to require a little bit more effort from you, I will be honest; you'll need to use your own little grey cells to make the connections you need to make. I won't go into why that is, because it's not just a spoiler but because it's a feature of the story. If anyone reading this hasn't read The Fan, it's a great next stop on the epistolary-novel-as-suspense trip. There are some very interesting similarities in the framing device...epistolary novels aren't all that often the choice authors make for suspense stories, and that accounts for a lot of it.

What keeps me from running down my street shoving the book into the hands of strangers (I live on the boardwalk in a beach town, so that's not as counterproductive as it first sounds) is the fact that the framing device keeps the pace of the action down. It's a feature of thrillers, which is what this is, to move quickly from scene to scene. In this case that does not happen. It's not a *fatal* flaw, but it's a real one.

It's all the rest of the features of Winifred/Freddie the Aussie in Boston as stand-in for Hannah the Sydney author creating her that kept me going when the pace flagged. It's the intricacies of the story-world (and the sneaky, weird ending!) that caused the most scalp-scratching moments and the most grin-producing realizations.

I'd say that four stars should shine on your path to the bookery of your choice to procure your own copy.

PUNCH ME UP TO THE GODS, what a joy to read a man's look at himself in his own mirror

PUNCH ME UP TO THE GODS
BRIAN BROOME
Mariner Books
$17.99 trade paper, available now

WINNER OF THE 34TH ANNUAL PUBLISHING TRIANGLE AWARDS: THE RANDY SHILTS AWARD FOR GAY NONFICTION!

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK FOR 2021!

Listen to this interview with Author Broome!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Punch Me Up to the Gods introduces a powerful new talent in Brian Broome, whose early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys propel forward this gorgeous, aching, and unforgettable debut. Brian’s recounting of his experiences—in all their cringe-worthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking glory—reveal a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in.

Indiscriminate sex and escalating drug use help to soothe his hurt, young psyche, usually to uproarious and devastating effect. A no-nonsense mother and broken father play crucial roles in our misfit’s origin story. But it is Brian’s voice in the retelling that shows the true depth of vulnerability for young Black boys that is often quietly near to bursting at the seams.

Cleverly framed around Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool,” the iconic and loving ode to Black boyhood, Punch Me Up to the Gods is at once playful, poignant, and wholly original. Broome’s writing brims with swagger and sensitivity, bringing an exquisite and fresh voice to ongoing cultural conversations about Blackness in America.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll start with a fact: The author's a poet.

One of the reasons I took this trip is to prove to myself that I am allowed to take up space in the world. I used to believe that the space I occupied was conditional. That I had to please anyone and everyone around me in order to exist because I had made the horrible mistake of being different.
–and–
It is only through your own lived experience that you will learn that living on the outside of "normal" provides the perfect view for spotting insecure and flimsy principles camouflaging themselves as leadership or righteousness.
–and–
Black boys don't get a long boyhood. It ends where white fear begins, brought on by deepening voices, broadening backs, and coarsening hair in new places beneath our clothing. Then there's our skin, which provides little middle ground.

You won't get a whisper of a whine from me about Author Broome's beautiful phrase-making. He is up there in the poetic-prose rankings. He could, and most likely will, give James Baldwin a run for his epoch-making money in the poetic eloquence on the Essence of Blackness derby.

Yes, I said that and I meant it. Moreso than other writers on Blackness, Author Broome's dual Othering of being a Black gay man adds the ingredient so often missing in manifestoes like Heavy or Between the World and Me. Worthy reads, even necessary ones. Tears We Cannot Stop offers a more religious, sentimental slant on the subject of Black maleness, and is an equally necessary voice to attend to. But James Baldwin, in his significant for its being so overlooked essay Nothing Personal, brings his religious past and his queer present and his uncertainty about the future into focus in much the same way that Author Broome does: as fact, as solid ground, as new, everlasting source of Otherness among the Othered. There being fifty-plus years between the two books, there are differences of tone made possible by the progress that has happened. There is not, however, a difference of kind in the subject of these books: The authors are Othered Others and are not allowed to make a life that doesn't center their Othered Otherness in this, our glorious country.

Author Broome uses the framing device of a young Black boy being psychologically shredded by the father who, I do not doubt for an instant, loves him and wants him to become a superstar in this world. To that father, as he browbeats and abuses his probably-queer young son, that means beating the gay out of him. That's also what it meant to Author Broome's father, emasculated by the same round of deindustrialization that created so many billionaires, and to Baldwin's religious-nut stepfather. The truth is these men, these fathers, aren't alone in thinking that they as well as their sons would be happier if the boys were either straight or dead. A quick flick of one's eyes over the statistics on adolescent suicide and teen drug use...this last plays quite a role in Author Broome's life...teaches us the toxic price paid by father, son, acquiescent or indifferent mother in death and destroyed personhood and family.

I think the power of reading the author's memories of growing up the Othered Other really rests in this: However easy it might have been for him to give in and let his addiction to drugs drag him into death, he does not. He stands on the rocks of his father's failed life, his mother's rage at...well, everything, and the cruel bonds of racist hatefulness (the dance party scene broke me), and he creates beautiful phrases and uses them to limn horrifying images onto my grotesquely privileged brain.

I have no method to persuade you that the act of shoving your most tender feelings way down deep or trying somehow to numb them will only result in someone else having to pick up your pieces later.

That, I feel, pretty much sums up the value in reading this book.

I've rated it four stars because, in service of being brought out in tree-book form, it's been made a little longer than it might should've been. About two-thirds of the way through the read, I realized I was using my commonplace book more than my Kindle's highlights function. The rapturous feeling of reading the beautiful words was ever-present. The story's painfully survived outlines weren't new to me. I don't expect them to be at my age. But the frankness about his sexual, um, adventures let us say, isn't fresh or new. It's raw, honest, and there for a reason, but what I think happened is that the otherwise too-loose narratives (from repetition) weren't a powerful enough frame to offer those very, very acute and sharp-edged memories their most effective perspective.

It is a small detraction from a large, loomingly menacingly honest, account of a Black Gay man's life in a world that hates each of those identites and conditions. The combination?

Read this book to find out.

BITTER ORANGE TREE, vibrant, passionate, *alive* woman's dark desires & MISTER N, a frank discussion of getting old and its price (not what it costs)

BITTER ORANGE TREE
JOKHA ALHARTHI (tr. Marilyn Booth)
Catapult
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Trade Paper Edition On Sale: 07/11/2023 | $16.95

Read the Electric Literature mutual interview between Author Alharthi and Translator Booth!

One of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2022

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From Man Booker International Prize–winning author Jokha Alharthi, Bitter Orange Tree is a profound exploration of social status, wealth, desire, and female agency. It presents a mosaic portrait of one young woman’s attempt to understand the roots she has grown from, and to envisage an adulthood in which her own power and happiness might find the freedom necessary to bear fruit and flourish.

Zuhour, an Omani student at a British university, is caught between the past and the present. As she attempts to form friendships and assimilate in Britain, she can’t help but ruminate on the relationships that have been central to her life. Most prominent is her strong emotional bond with Bint Amir, a woman she always thought of as her grandmother, who passed away just after Zuhour left the Arabian Peninsula.

As the historical narrative of Bint Amir’s challenged circumstances unfurls in captivating fragments, so too does Zuhour’s isolated and unfulfilled present, one narrative segueing into another as time slips and dreams mingle with memories.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Celestial Bodies, Author Alharthi and Translator Booth's previous literary collaboration, revolved around three women and their men...present, absent, loved, loathed, and longed for. It received the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, as it was called then. I myownself checked it out of the library and would've given it a three-star review had I bothered to review it at all...stories centering women organizing themselves and their worlds around men don't appeal to me. The prose was lyrical and pungent.

That last is what I love about this read:

I had gone. And then she had gone. And it wasn't possible to change anything. What the hand of fate had written could not be unwritten. That ancient line of poetry: All your tears, all your pleas, will erase not a line of that which is written. For I had gone, and I went away without smiling. I just went, in my cocky presumption that I could look the other way. That I didn't know; that I didn't need to know. And then remorse. Harsh, grating regret, making me more fragile than the brittle autumn leaves crumbling under the janitor's broom beneath my window.

–and–

"My grandmother would've given anything to be a peasant farmer," I said. And then immediately I regretted my abrupt reaction. Suroor raised her head. "Your grandmother?" Right. The words had come out and they couldn't be put back. I had said it: my grandmother. Why don't words come automatically with threads that we can yank to pull them back inside ourselves? But there are no threads attached. Those words had been said. What's done is done.

It's all there. Author Alharthi's style, the sentences not too terribly complex but the interrelationship of the words and images is dense, is active, is trellising the reader's vines of awareness into specific patterns that cast wildly distorting shadows on the life in the text.

It is exhilarating to read a simple story that reaches into shadows and under storage shelves and behind armoires in the reader. It means the writer and the translator have offered us everything they found when they rummaged through those spaces in themselves. If you, as I strongly suggest that you do, read the Electric Lit piece I've linked above, you'll come at this read with a vastly bigger experience of the intentionality of the writing. I think the best thing about that awareness, acquired before (in your case) or after (as in mine) finishing the novel, is its honing, its sharpening, of the decoding tools you have at your disposal to be in the read. I've chosen those two passages from the same early section of the story to illustrate that enriching quality.

What reading Bitter Orange Tree offered me was a stroll in a garden planted with almost-familiar-scented plants in service of a geometry slightly not what I am accustomed to (read: not centered so heavily on the women's men). The way the choices I've selected above interrelate and build on the character of Zuhour's perceptual world, the sensory and the eidetic, are the principal pleasure of this read. Like my stream-of-consciousness idol Virginia Woolf, the words build images and the images are shaped by the words as well as by the things the words evoke from us in their saying. Everything Zuhour senses is an image from her startlingly acute inner world...no fogs of forgetfulness (even when summoned, as above) cloud her quietly desperate longing for one more, once again, please just this single time.

Of course she gets none. No one does, and no depths of longing can break the iron arrow...crossbow quarrel, more like...of time. No matter how many times one says ignore, actually performing the act of ignoring is entirely different and often opposed by the metaphysical gravity of love. (I think it was this strange, off-kilter perceptual frame that reduced my rating from five to four stars, though....)

Because yes, this is a love story. Aren't they all. Yes, they all are but this love, Zuhour's love, is so tragically lacking self-love that it's the desperately sad kind of love-ungiven story that can reshape a life. Yours, o reader, if you will allow it; better or worse, as you use it.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

MISTER N
NAJWA BARAKAT (tr. Luke Leafgreen)
And Other Stories
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Modern-day Beirut is seen through the eyes of a failed writer, the eponymous Mister N. He has left his comfortable apartment and checked himself into a hotel—he thinks. Certainly, they take good care of him there. Meanwhile, on the streets below, a grim pageant: poverty, violence and fear.

How is anyone supposed to write deathless prose in such circumstances? Let alone an old man like Mister N., whose life and memories have become scattered, whose family regards him as an embarrassment, and whose next-door neighbours torment him with their noise, dinner invitations, and inconvenient suicides. Comical and tragic by turns, his misadventures climax in the arrival in what Mister N. had supposed to be his “real life” of a character from one of his early novels – a vicious militiaman. Now, does the old writer need to arm himself…or just seek psychiatric help?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: And Other Stories publishes unusual and often puzzling books. This one feels a little bit like someone found Kafka's Akashic records and channeled them through a Lebanese American writer's intense psychedelic dreams.

He liked precision and hated rough estimates. The approximate was arbitrary, the arbitrary was random, the random was chaotic, and chaos was a killer. Mr. N liked to cut away the imprecise, as he did with his pencils when he sharpened them, shaving their tips into points to make their lines clear and defined. Pens? Pens were unacceptable. Pens could leak, flooding pages with smothering ink. Ink behaved like a dictator: ordering, forbidding, controlling, brooking no dissent. Lead, meanwhile, was merciful, quick to forgive mistakes. Whatever your soul was brooding over, lead would let it speak. Ink soiled the white page; lead dissolved upon the surface, exactly as pain dissolved in the act of writing…

–and–

The human ability to adapt—to things positive and negative, to plenty and scarcity, to life and death—is terrifying. I watched {her} transform day by day. She contracted within the apartment; then she expanded to fill it. She feared her pimp would find her; then she relaxed into her new situation and her new identity. … …I felt her skin expanding, her limbs lengthening, her face settling into gladness. I saw her unwinding into something more tender, like dough when it relaxes.

Mister N is a guest in a swanky hotel. Mister N's a writer...published several novels, well-received ones...whose home is Beirut with all that implies. Mister N's...not feeling himself. Mister N's been through some stuff. Mister N's older brother is the last vestige of family he has, dead father, dead mother, in fact only his old, established nemesis, his Moriarty, a man called Luqman, is visiting Mister N despite his many vociferous complaints to Mr. Andrew, the, um, concierge or owner or someone like that, that these are unwelcome and invasive occasions of great upset.

The blows to Mister N's fragile peace of mind never really stop coming. There are so many old issues that need to be put to rest. There are absurdly youthful old people acting like hormonal kids! (Not Mister N...beta blockers, don't you know, those desire-slayers, are among his meds.) Mister N witnesses a...a...hanging, certainly, though not actually a murder as Mister N tells it. Mister N rides herd on the unruly voices in his head, the ones that enable Mister N to write their stories. As I've always said, being a writer is actually the socially acceptable face of schizophrenia. And sometimes just barely that.

The blows to Mister N's reality don't stop coming. Author Barakat is not kind. In memory, in fantasy, in reality...none of these states, and they all exist in the course of Mister N's time with us, are delineated. I don't think one gains a single, solitary thing trying to tease out the "different" frames of reference in this story. It won't make passages such as this:

Our mosquitoes and other local insects have developed quite the work ethic in recent years. They toil now not only to feed themselves, but from the pleasure of causing pain, which, having tasted once, they find impossible to relinquish. Rats, mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches, feral cats, pariah dogs: all of them are vicious now and liable to get drunk on the simple taste of killing, much as humans do.

...one whit more or less effective to think of them as belonging to "reality" or "fantasy" within the book's constructed world. Mister N, you see, is not in the least who he thinks he is; and, as we are all the sum of our memories, that simple fact makes Mister N a construct, a chimera of parts from we can never know where. More to the point, neither can Mister N:

My head is a train of many cars, each of them going in a different direction. All I need to do is put them back in line so they might travel in the correct direction. Is this my entire life that I have put on the wall? How old have I become now?

The only necessary answer to this question, directed from and/or to wherever one may, is "as old as my eyes, a little older than my teeth." (The Santa Claus response.) Mister N can not really answer it as phrased. Reality passes at different rates on different scales...the days drag, the years fly by...for us all, but most of all for those of disordered thinking. And to some degree, that's my beef with the read. I don't think the story itself comes out of the time-frame-hopping all the way intact. I grant that characters in this récit are all internal to Mister N, but they still jar with their sudden vanishings and dangling conversations. An itchy lack-of-closure feeling pervaded my reading experience.

Exactly how disordered Mister N's thinking is, for all that, is one of the pleasures of reading this short, powerful, frequently authorially self-referential récit all the way to the end. I recommend you do that soonest. Preorder it now!

BLACK BUCK, savagely funny & supremely fun send-up/roast/take-down of US business culture

BLACK BUCK
MATEO ASKARIPOUR
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$26.00 hardcover, available now

AN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY BUZZIEST WORKPLACE BOOK OF 2021!

The Young Lions Fiction Award shortlist has the author on it! The New York Public Library will announce the winner on 16 June 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: There’s nothing like a Black salesman on a mission.

An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother’s home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC’s hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.

After enduring a “hell week” of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as “Buck,” a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family. But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he’s hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.

Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of America’s workforce; it is a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Please, please, someone in Black Hollywood make this into a movie! I can't think of a better time, or a better story, to use this terrific twist on The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to skewer the shrinking opportunity pool! The Economist cites statistics that show that white bros are more eager than BIPoC employees to return to the office, stop remote working. Reading this book will give you a visceral, intense sense of why that most likely is true...and what the grim consequences for diversity in the workplace could turn out to be.

Not, however, if Author Askaripour has anything to say about it.

You see, there's some truth to the old adages "be careful what you wish for, lest the answer be 'yes'" and "you get back what you give out." Darren, twenty-two and a barista with a pretty good life (he thinks; his mom disagrees), sees one of his regulars ordering the same boring thing every morning. He does what a good sales person always does: suggests an alternative, a different and more interesting drink. Without being crappy about it, he persists until the customer agrees to try the new item. Which he loves.

Darren's brewed his last latte. He upsold the founder of SumWun and now he has a high-powered sales job waiting for him. That maybe he doesn't want...or isn't sure he wants...but let me tell you, when someone who's got what it takes to grab enough money to found a viable tech company wants you, it would do you best to get your stuff out of your locker and go with him right then. There will be no rest until your onboarding process is complete and your world revolves around Selling the Widget.

Author Askaripour chose to frame this narrative as one of those metastatic "positivity/self-help/I succeeded you can too" memoirs recrudescing all over bookstores like lesions on a cancer patient. It was, I thought for about two chapters, going to make me a crazy person. "I have to bail," I whimpered to my Young Gentleman Caller. "I might get seriously ill, this is reminding me of all those years selling!"

"Read me some," he said, "just enter {position number} and let's go."

“Ain’ no Black people need no therapists, ’cause we don’ be havin’ those mental issues. OCD, ADD, PTSD, and all those other acronyms they be comin’ up with every day. I’m tellin’ you, the only acronyms Black folk need help with is the NYPD, FBI, CIA, KKK, and KFC, ’cause I know they be puttin’ shit in those twelve-piece bucket meals to make us addicted to them.”

"That was funny! You haven't got that far yet, you have to find out why that's there," I was ordered.

You rock, Rob. I took the ride, I enjoyed the whole ride, and you're the one who made it happen.

It was sometimes cringe to me how close Author Askaripour sailed to the winds of snottiness. It was often the case, however, that he found my ticklish spot right after that. I am not going to say I think everyone should read the book because the humor-deficient will be blankly confused why it's supposed to be funny or outraged that their demographic is being scored off ("He reeked of privilege, Rohypnol, and tax breaks" is one of the most memorable snorts of derision). For me, possibly for you, there's an aesthetic hill to climb in the format being parodied; but there is something so very good to gain by persevering: Belly laughs at the sheer inventive snark leveled at targets who could use some dings and scratches on their cheap veneer.

Recommended for some good, cathartic belly laughs.

THE MIKE CHEN PAGE, three fine reads you need to get into before his latest appears

A BEGINNING AT THE END
MIKE CHEN
MIRA Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.49 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: How do you start over after the end of the world?

Six years after a global pandemic wiped out most of the planet’s population, the survivors are rebuilding the country, split between self-governing cities, hippie communes and wasteland gangs.

In postapocalyptic San Francisco, former pop star Moira has created a new identity to finally escape her past—until her domineering father launches a sweeping public search to track her down. Desperate for a fresh start herself, jaded event planner Krista navigates the world on behalf of those too traumatized to go outside, determined to help everyone move on—even if they don’t want to. Rob survived the catastrophe with his daughter, Sunny, but lost his wife. When strict government rules threaten to separate parent and child, Rob needs to prove himself worthy in the city’s eyes by connecting with people again.

Krista, Moira, Rob and Sunny are brought together by circumstance, and their lives begin to twine together. But when reports of another outbreak throw the fragile society into panic, the friends are forced to finally face everything that came before—and everything they still stand to lose.

Because sometimes having one person is enough to keep the world going.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

“See, relations are people with the same blood. But family, that's different. Family is about who gives you hope, who gets involved. And earns the right for forgiveness. Or at least starts down the path.”
–and–
As a community, we still emphasized the importance of familial ties but finally understood that the definition of family wasn't about blood or even who or what you'd lost. It was about what gave you hope and who was willing to get involved.

You're fully in the thick of this book's ethos with those two quotes.

Post-apocalyptic Britney Spears story, full of the expected drama, and all the better for it. The book was published very early in COVID times, so it really felt too on-the-nose for me to get much distance to do more than gibber incoherently at it. Author Chen's first novel, see below for Here and Now and Then's review, was a very good, if simplistic, rendering of an extremely complex story. In this sophmore effort, he's definitely learned from the crafting of a novel for sale to the public and applied those lessons. In the manner of telling, in the effort to craft sentences, every way this book shows the growth of an artist who listens and learns.

Many are the comparisons made between this book and the superficially similar Station Eleven...post-pandemic societies with survivors doing what people always do, muddling through as best they can to get their livings, as much like they always have as possible. This story's focus isn't on a complete collapse, as Station Eleven focuses on; instead it's more like this present moment, issues and hitches and ongoing crunches; then all Hell breaks loose.

That is where Author Chen shines in his craftsmanship. All the stuff you've read until now, thinking "hmmm is this actually worth going a-dystopianing?" snaps into focus. Author Chen does not stint. Because it's not the World that's ending again; it's the world of each character's own making.

In other words, Life Goes On.

That's the post-apocalyptic novel I want to read, and the one I got here. The one where we're talking about "Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder" or PASD. I absolutely devoured it because each story, the Britney Spears one and the fatherhood-in-dystopia one, kept me fanning pages as fast as I could.

Author Chen is, it is clear, a father, and that makes his storytelling from a father's perspective. That is very much what I want to read. And, I hope, to read his work when he becomes a grandfather...though it's not likely I'll live that long...because it's a refreshing change to find a man telling the emotional story of his parenthood against this backdrop.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

WE COULD BE HEROES
MIKE CHEN
MIRA Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The super hero book you need to read right now!

An extraordinary and emotional adventure about unlikely friends and the power of choosing who you want to be.

Jamie woke up in an empty apartment with no memory and only a few clues to his identity, but with the ability to read and erase other people’s memories—a power he uses to hold up banks to buy coffee, cat food and books.

Zoe is also searching for her past, and using her abilities of speed and strength…to deliver fast food. And she’ll occasionally put on a cool suit and beat up bad guys, if she feels like it.

When the archrivals meet in a memory-loss support group, they realize the only way to reveal their hidden pasts might be through each other. As they uncover an ongoing threat, suddenly much more is at stake than their fragile friendship. With countless people at risk, Zoe and Jamie will have to recognize that sometimes being a hero starts with trusting someone else—and yourself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

“I’ll figure something out” probably wound up being the last sentence said by a lot of people in difficult scenarios.
–and–
“If you're the one everyone relies on, if you take on people's burdens, sometimes there's just not that much left of you.”

There. That's the emotional core of this read, as I see it anyway; how can you live up to your best and still do your life's miscellany? Who gets to drain you of your reserves with your permission, and why?

Answering those questions outside the framework of a Romantic Relationship is the central conflict in the story of Zoe and Jamie. They aren't, and don't become, lovers; they are friends. They are bonded by something weird, that is being without memories but with superpowers. And they are very, very unlikely to remain friends when their pasts recrudesce.

Screw that, says my imaginary avi of Author Chen, Real Life has lots of examples of friends who don't fit! He is, of course, correct, and he makes sure that the story develops in such a way that they must come together to use their superpowers but only together will they work to stop...a villain who wants to feed the whole, overcrowded world...?!

Wait. What?

Yes, that's right folks, we're in the era of "superheroes aren't so great" fiction! If you've paid me the slightest bit of attention, you already know I adore Natalie Zina Walschots' HENCH for its unflinching take-down of the Cult of the Superhero. It is greatly to my taste. I think the whole MCU and DCEU are, in a word, brummagem. But there's something irresistible in the stories available to tell in them...Irresistible Force meeting Immovable Object can be played for laughs, for tears, for intensity or resolution. It is always going to find takers. But I, perverse old bastard that I am, want to find takers-on instead.

Author Chen's chops are up to it. What he doesn't seem to want to do, however, is explore pansexual Jamie's sexuality. It's not even there, it's simply referred to. If one doesn't want to use the gun, don't bring the gun out. I'm not asking for details, I'm asking for more than a mention of him having had a husband. This is the 21st century, not the 20th...don't tell me we're going there and we're not.

But that was not a fatal flaw in a story that gave me morally gray, but more goal-oriented than selfishly motivated, characters overcoming not only a handicap but a lifetime's conditioning to work together to solve a problem they could only hope to really fix if they worked together. That was worth so much to me. In a deeply divided world, it needs saying again and again: Do you want to Be Right, or fix what's wrong?

I like Jamie's and Zoe's answers.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

HERE AND NOW AND THEN
MIKE CHEN
MIRA Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: To save his daughter, he’ll go anywhere—and any-when…

Kin Stewart is an everyday family man: working in IT, trying to keep the spark in his marriage, struggling to connect with his teenage daughter, Miranda. But his current life is a far cry from his previous career…as a time-traveling secret agent from 2142.

Stranded in suburban San Francisco since the 1990s after a botched mission, Kin has kept his past hidden from everyone around him, despite the increasing blackouts and memory loss affecting his time-traveler’s brain. Until one afternoon, his “rescue” team arrives—eighteen years too late.

Their mission: return Kin to 2142, where he’s only been gone weeks, not years, and where another family is waiting for him. A family he can’t remember.

Torn between two lives, Kin is desperate for a way to stay connected to both. But when his best efforts threaten to destroy the agency and even history itself, his daughter’s very existence is at risk. It’ll take one final trip across time to save Miranda—even if it means breaking all the rules of time travel in the process.

A uniquely emotional genre-bending debut, Here and Now and Then captures the perfect balance of heart, playfulness, and imagination, offering an intimate glimpse into the crevices of a father’s heart and its capacity to stretch across both space and time to protect the people that mean the most.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Somehow, he’d mistaken her being good at something for really wanting to do it.
–and–
Sometimes I feel like I can’t move forward with things. Because it’s not right that life is happening without her. But I keep telling myself that she would want us to change and move forward. She’d say an awesome quote and it’d make it all right. So I’m nervous because of how I feel. But I’m also nervous because it’s like this big life thing without Mom and I wonder how can it really be me without her. We’re all different people all through our lives, but that’s okay, as long as you remember all the people you used to be.

What you really need to know about this read is there, in those quotes.

It's been several years since I got this DRC, to my shame, and I've put off writing about it because it was...good. Okay reading. Neat ideas! And it could've been so much more. There are reasons, though, to pass on from bashing a first novel. The resulting career is a big one: Mike Chen's a significant author in SF these days. He's grown a good deal as a writer, and this promising start has paid off.

The emotional core of this crossed-destinies story is still: Did a missing past even matter anymore compared to human touch in the here and now? It's a clear-cut choice and Kin, the point-of-view time traveler, must make it. What happens to him, as a result of making his choice, isn't a perfect ending. It is a happy one, and worthy of the suspenseful story that led to it. But...and this is a key consideration...there's a reason none of my quotes are dialogue.

Go in forearmed. Enjoy the good things the story offers, and be entertained.

HOT MALL SANTA, Xmas silliness & steamy fun; & A COP FOR CHRISTMAS, less steam but as much silliness & fun

A COP FOR CHRISTMAS
JAMIE FESSENDEN
Self-published (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Mason Collier isn’t big on authority figures. When Office Steve Coleman pulls him over and gives him a speeding ticket, he doesn’t react well. He’s even less happy when he discovers the cop lives next door to his parents’ house.

No matter where they turn this holiday season, Steve and Mason keep running into each other, and whenever they talk for more than a minute, they piss each other off. But from wayward dogs to Christmas tree hunts to maple syrup festivals, it proves impossible to avoid each other in the small town.

If Mason can see the good man behind the badge, he might just get a cop for Christmas.

THIS WAS A GIFTIE FROM DEARLY BELOVÈD RONI!

My Review: Pretty much straight-people safe! Moderate steam!

One thing to know about this story is the whole reason these guys work as a couple from the jump is they're the only kind of guys the other thinks about. They're just primed, ready to go, when they meet. Being attracted to someone's essential presentation of self is a good quick-start to instaluuuv.

“I’m all for getting some sleep—I’m wiped. But I wouldn’t object to a little cuddling.”

Steve’s eyebrows twitched. And something much, much lower on his body twitched too. “Um… sure. We could do that.”

“Did I shock you? Collier men aren’t known for being subtle.”

Steve laughed. “Well, Coleman men kind of need to be hit over the head.”

“Consider yourself hit over the head, then.”

I love the calm way Steve the cop makes his sexual versatility obvious. I love Mason's equally calm clarity that he's bottoming being so matter-of-fact.

“I told you,” Steve said, fishing {a condom} out and examining it. “Jackie is a woman of the world. And, no, I don’t mean she sleeps around. I mean her life would make a great novel, she’s probably the smartest person I know, and this isn’t the first time she’s had guests who might need condoms and lube. Is this for my dick or yours?”

“Yours.”

Cute. Sweet. So cheerfully positive!

“We forgot to put a snowman at the end of the driveway, so I volunteered to stand here until morning.”

“Wiseass. Are you going back inside or do you want a ride somewhere?”

That was kind of a dumb question. Where the hell would he be going on foot in a snowstorm? But Mason couldn’t resist saying, “I’ll go wherever you’re going.”

See? Sweet! Two w-bombs lowered the score a half-point, and another half-point died when Author Fessenden made two not-snarky not-unkind mentions of Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™. But on balance, it does what it says it will do on the box so here you go: small-town sweetness and one (1) full sex scene.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

HOT MALL SANTA
A.J. TRUMAN
Self-published (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: You better watch out. You better not cry. Hot Mall Santa is coming to town!

Instead of round and jolly, this year’s mall Santa is chiseled and smoldering. The second he strolls into Oakville Mall wearing sunglasses, stubble, and his Santa hat cocked to the side, Santa gets all the tongues wagging—especially Tom Webster’s. A lowly retail associate at The Décor Store, Tom spends his time chasing a promotion and boss that are both out of reach. His fantasies about being a ho-ho-ho for Santa soon cross into reality after an unexpected night together. While the rest of the town obsesses over Hot Mall Santa, Tom gets to know the sweet, nerdy history buff under the suit and six-pack abs. But to win Santa’s heart, he must fight off the lusty moms, adoring fans, and his own fear of rejection.

Hot Mall Santa is a fun and sexy novella at 32,000 words filled with nutty Christmas shoppers, a grown man wearing reindeer antlers, and too many holiday puns.

THIS WAS A YULE GIFT FROM DEAR, SWEET RONI. THANK YOU!

My Review: Cute'n'steamy...the line forms out the mall doors to get some lap time with Hot Mall Santa!

“He was like the living embodiment of sex. His beard was pulled down, and he had these amazing cheeks and jaw. It’s like whatever the cheek and jaw equivalent is to an ass you can bounce a quarter off of.”

You're getting just what it says on the package: hot guy does crummy job & looks great doing it.

“It’s weird when all people do is compliment something about you that you had no part in. It’s not like being praised for something I’ve done or made. Just something I am. Like a zoo animal.”

Poor guy...he's not even taken at face value, just value of face. What makes it Xmas fun us that job is being Santa. What a cute Horny Hallmark this would be! And the pleasure of Tom waking up to being used by his boss...Randall being such a mensch...it's got the Holiday formula down.

He grabbed at Randall’s faux fur-trimmed lapels and pulled him closer, shoving his tongue into his pretty, Hot Mall Santa mouth. His hands traveled across his chest and tumbled down his washboard ads. Tom had thought that washboard abs were something that only existed in cologne ads.

There's no time like the present to get your good luck handled. And handle him Tom does! The charm of sex scenes with plenty of detail will likely be lost on the straighter folk. You're not likely to get the "ordinary-guy-bags-the-buff-bod" now are you? Haw! There was an entire film about that, the woman was tubby and the guy thought she was gorgeous and people lapped it up...so don't prim your lips and start carryin' on about objectifyin' and such-like quite so fast.

What makes this story fun to read is the way the author decided to make the pretty-boy hung like a stallion and good with it into a nerd. It's like discovering Henry Cavill plays video games and TTRPGs and the like. He's proof that Randall isn't a complete fantasy object. This was harmless fun, spiced with hot sex and sweet lovingkindness.

They got out of the car. A light dusting of snow began to fall from the sky. It was nothing a Midwesterner couldn’t handle. Tom doubted it would even stick to the roads. Randall treated it as the most beautiful precipitation he’d ever seen. It was probably his first white Christmas. He held his hands out to touch it, lifted his head, laughed as it dotted his cheeks. Who knew that beneath the raging sex appeal, there would be a layer of dorkiness, and that it could be nothing short of adorable?

You're getting exactly what it says on the package, so is that what you want? It was what I wanted and it went down a treat.

THE SANTA SUIT, sweet Holiday second-chance story

THE SANTA SUIT
MARY KAY ANDREWS
St. Martin's Press non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From Mary Kay Andrews, the New York Times bestselling author of Hello, Summer, comes a novella celebrating the magic of Christmas and second chances in The Santa Suit.

When newly-divorced Ivy Perkins buys an old farmhouse sight unseen, she is definitely looking for a change in her life. The Four Roses, as the farmhouse is called, is a labor of love—but Ivy didn't bargain on just how much labor. The previous family left so much furniture and so much junk, that it's a full-time job sorting through all of it.

At the top of a closet, Ivy finds an old Santa suit—beautifully made and decades old. In the pocket of a suit she finds a note written in a childish hand: it's from a little girl who has one Christmas wish, and that is for her father to return home from the war. This discovery sets Ivy off on a mission. Who wrote the note? Did the man ever come home? What mysteries did the Rose family hold?

Ivy's quest brings her into the community, at a time when all she wanted to do was be left alone and nurse her wounds. But the magic of Christmas makes miracles happen, and Ivy just might find more than she ever thought possible: a welcoming town, a family reunited, a mystery solved, and a second chance at love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Andrews is an established force in romantic-fiction publishing, with thirty-ish successes on her credits. You know, therefore, that you're not going to feel duped or cheated when you read her work. There is no realistic chance you're getting some hyped-up yet unsatisfying work, something you'd look at with frustration as you wondered how to get back those three hours.

What's on offer here is a sweet, unsteamy romantic story about a house, its secrets, and a town full of the kind of people you wouldn't look at twice unless you Believe, like Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. After all, who's to say who's who? The fact that everyone, literally everyone, comes out of this short read with exactly what they need and what the want, well...it's a category romance with a Christmas theme and its title is The Santa Suit. You're getting what you signed up for!

I was drenched in Satan's piss three times (that is, the w-bomb was dropped on my unwilling reader's head) but with a twist: the w-bomber was in all three cases a woman doing that at another woman! So that had the virtue of novelty. It did not make it more pleasant.

There are the expected numbers of miracles, aka coincidences, in the course of the film, I mean novella! There are people doing the right thing grudgingly. but doing it; there are a lot of reminders that this isn't the Big City and everyone knows everyone else. That, mes vieux, is again what you signed up for. And you're going to get your HEA with a heaping tablespoon of sentimentality, too. I can't help myself...I lapped it up, I gurgled with disgust when w-bombed and I squirmed a wee tiny bit when gender politics made me uncomfortable (the Bechdel Test score here is not zero...it's negative). But I lapped it up.

One big reason is that Author Andrews is a seriously experienced wordsmith. I can't quote you any special lines, they're all perfectly adequate and none are lumpenly out of place; they aren't memorable. I didn't go in expecting them to be, so another check in the met-expectations box. I wasn't planning to write a whole review, only a Burgoine, but the presence of the dog Punkin and the four hens (a-calling!, in this case) and the overwhelming presence of Shiny Brite and C9 decorations...well...I was weak.

I love the verve and gusto of people who decorate their fool heads off for the Solstice Holiday, call it Yule or Saturnalia or Christmas. It's a dark, long night and we need the blessèd relief of bright colors and shiny surfaces. In our reads, too. Enjoy this one. Happy Holiday!